


on certain days

by preromantics



Category: Bandom, Panic At The Disco
Genre: M/M, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-07-21
Updated: 2010-07-21
Packaged: 2017-10-10 17:33:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,539
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/102306
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/preromantics/pseuds/preromantics
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ryan's nineteenth through twenty-fifth birthdays. <i>He's turning nineteen and there is a sort of hollow hope in his bones.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	on certain days

He's turning nineteen and there is a sort of hollow hope in his bones; his fingers are calloused from guitar strings, from everything he puts into each chord.

Spencer's mom makes a cake, but they take it and eat it in the park. Brent falls asleep in the grass, face up, half the cake somewhere in his stomach.

Brendon laughs too loud -- he's got bags under his eyes and he keeps rubbing at his own wrists, keeps blinking up at the sun while Ryan watches, watches the way Brendon's eyelashes fall down on his cheeks every time he tries to jolt himself awake. Ryan thinks about ways to tell Brendon he feels the same way, but he's half lying down in the grass, too, and Spencer is laughing about something near the vicinity of his ribs and it vibrates up inside him.

Ryan eats too much cake, licks the rich icing off his fingers and Brendon doesn't eat as much as he should. Brent shakes awake just as Brendon falls asleep against a tree and he leaves, has to get back, somewhere, but he hugs Ryan tight anyway, _congrats on another year_, and Spencer and Ryan let Brendon sleep.

Spencer licks the rest of the icing off his mom's floral plate with his fingers, his cheeks flushed red from the late-summer sun. Ryan only looks around the park once before he lays down next to where Brendon is curled in exhaustion, tree bark leaving layers of red indents on his cheek, and he pulls Spencer to the other side of them.

"This year is it," Spencer says, somewhat hazily, reaching over Brendon's waist to curl his fingers loosely around Ryan's wrist, Brendon blinking his eyes open once and then slumping down onto Ryan's shoulder.

Ryan stays at the edge of consciousness as the sun dips down and the grass gets cold and his stomach feels too full from cake. He feels, for the first time in a long while, ready and just a little bit invincible.

  
-

  
He's turning twenty and when it hits midnight, he's trapped in-between two bodies -- Brendon on his right, mouth dragging down his neck, and Spencer on his left, laughing in his ear.

Brendon sings happy birthday, after; Jon is down at the edge of the bed, Spencer on his lap, and Ryan is somewhat reluctantly caught in a tangle of Brendon's arms and legs, hot and a little slick with sweat. Brendon's singing is off-key and Ryan knows that the day is just beginning, the digital clock in his peripheral vision flashing somewhere near two, but they all fall asleep on the too-small bed instead of staying up all night.

Ryan wakes up over heated and twenty-fucking-years-old and Brendon's head is on his chest, his hair sticking up, his palm over a bruise on Ryan's hipbone, and when Ryan swallows his throat is dry, and when he backs up he can't move away, the heat of Jon's back and the press of his spine too near. He shuts his eyes against the early morning sun and relaxes back, thinks too much and probably not enough, and waits a minute before pressing a smile into the mess of Brendon's hair.

He's lived a year full of ups and, quietly, he falls back asleep, content.

  
-

  
He's turning twenty one and everything is different. He feels a little more hollow than he should, but also entitled, also like he deserves it. There are more people in the room than he can count, and too many people touch him like they have the right. (Only two of them do, and almost, somewhere, it feels like betrayal, but he's not admitting that. He spends a fair amount of time not admitting a lot of things, always has, and he isn't going to start on his birthday. He's going to let everyone else be happy for him.)

He leaves the party and his birthday is over, and he walks away from the people he should be with and goes to the people he owes the night to, instead.

Brendon doesn't -- he doesn't touch Ryan, not at first. He touches the strings of the guitar in the corner of the room and he touches the keys on the keyboard balanced on the dresser, and Spencer makes Ryan drink water that settles like a stormy sea in his stomach.

He doesn't have to apologize, but he leans into Spencer's hands on his neck like an apology anyway and later -- much later, into the morning, Brendon says, _happy birthday_ somewhere inside Ryan's thigh, and he doesn't sound happy about it, but Ryan cups the sides of his jaw when they kiss and presses his fingers in too-hard until Brendon bites at his lip and Ryan can't figure out where his body begins.

  
-

  
His twenty second birthday is angry. Jon is there, and Alex, and a slew of people and blond hair and brown hair spread out across his living room in the dark.

He lets Jon have him, though, like that little piece of them, of everything, might keep him together, and it does. Jon leaves bruises on his hip bones, in the indents of his ribs, inside his thighs -- because Ryan asks, doesn't explain why, says it lightly. He doesn't come apart.

The morning after Ryan stands in his bathroom naked, his phone on the counter fogged with the steam from his shower -- three voicemails, two texts, two people. Ryan looks at the colors blossoming on his skin in the shape of Jon's fingers and doesn't think about the hundreds of marks from other hands they are covering up, layer after layer.

As a birthday present to himself he buys a new phone. He would have lost that one, anyway. He changes his number because it costs less money and the guy at the cell phone kiosk at the mall doesn't ask any questions, but he does wish Ryan a happy belated birthday when he enters Ryan's information. Ryan laughs at that.

  
-

  
His twenty third birthday isn't angry, not in the justified sense, not in any sense. He's fine, more than fine. He has fun and he _lives_. He turns his phone off and he backs away from Jon's questioning hand on his back because he doesn't need that, doesn't need the reminder.

Except, when everyone clears out and when he lays back on his own pillows, four in the morning, officially beyond twenty-three, Ryan turns his phone on and lets it vibrate with missed messages, none from the people he didn't want to see anyway, and he digs his fingers hard into his own skin like he's sixteen, seventeen again, before everything.

In the morning he shakes it off, he starts the day with a headache and with a haze, but he's fine, and he aches just a little when he walks, and it's not a reminder, not at all.

  
-

  
His twenty fourth birthday is -- is a mostly empty house. It's coming off a year of good and a year of bad, but Ryan doesn't want to share the night or the day with anyone.

Spencer is on his couch on the 29th, but he doesn't come into Ryan's room when it turns midnight. Ryan knows; he watches the clock tick over to the next day.

In the morning, Ryan sits in his backyard. He really has to cut the grass. Spencer sits next to him, unfolds his legs and they look longer than Ryan remembers, and their shoulders touch.

"How's it feel?" Spencer asks, quiet.

Ryan turns, laughs into the soft material of Spencer's shirt -- Brendon's shirt, stretched out and borrowed on Spencer's skin. Ryan wonders if they do that a lot, share things, if maybe they moved on from sharing Ryan to sharing clothes instead, and if it works better.

"I miss you, you know," Ryan says, looking at a string of lights falling down from a tree across from them.

Spencer presses his lips into the top of Ryan's hair, comfortable like it hasn't been years. Ryan supposes at some level it will always be automatic, though, like things don't stop in one place because they end in another. In people.

"We miss you, too," Spencer says. Easy.

_We_, Ryan thinks.

"He --" he starts.

"Brendon, too, yes," Spencer says, pulling Ryan close and tucking his chin over Ryan's head, like Ryan is fourteen again and is sitting cross-legged on Spencer's twin bed, like Ryan is newly nineteen and letting the bark of a tree bite into his spine.

  
-

  
Ryan spends the first day of his twenty-fourth year in a bed he's never been in, but with two pairs of hands he remembers with his eyes closed. He doesn't say sorry, because that's not -- he doesn't have to.

He licks the salt off Brendon's skin and they don't mark him, but he wakes up afterward with the memory of it all over his skin the next day, anyway.

They sit in the living room and Brendon makes breakfast and Spencer makes a belated cake piled high with icing, and they don't talk about it, but Ryan overstays his welcome all the way until his next birthday and -- he feels ready and just a little bit invincible all over again.


End file.
